Re: [dpub-pwp] Pull request for rewrite of intro to PWP white paper

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 9:07 PM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:

>> Furthermore, a web publication is an ordered collection of resources. The publisher must provide a default sequence through the primary constituent resources
>
> Really? An encyclopedia seems like a valid candidate for a web publication, but it is not fundamentally ordered. I agree that a web publication needs an entrypoint and needs to have all parts of the publication be reachable via internal navigation, but a linear ordering of the content seems to be only one way to achieve that. If you want to print the whole thing, you're going to have to find a way to linearize it, but it seems to me that the claim that ordering is a defining characteristic of a web publication is a tad too strong, even though it is not completely baseless.

The primary mode of organization may not be sequential, but I think
it's valuable to have as a fallback. Even encyclopedias traditionally
defaulted to alphabetical order. Being able to print something is a
valid use case. I'd hate to hit "print" and then be faced with a
drag-and-drop interface for sequencing all the components of a
publication! Defaults do come in handy. Magazines and newspapers
convey meaning via the spatial organization of their content, even if
the constituent components mostly stand by themselves.

One lovely thing about books, magazines, newspapers, letters, etc. is
that you can get to all the content without doing anything special.
Just keep turning the page and you'll get everywhere. I can't do that
with Wikipedia, or with the NYTimes website. Maybe there's something
fundamental in a publication being  bounded and ordered, or at least
potentially ordered.

Dave

Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2016 02:46:06 UTC